According to a clinical trial, the weight loss drug Wegovy significantly reduced symptoms and also improved the quality of life in people with obesity as well as those with the most common form of heart failure. This trial has potentially expanded the drug’s use beyond diabetes and weight loss, offering a new treatment option where few are available. The study was published last Friday in the New England Journal of Medicine.
A total of 529 patients were examined, with drugmaker Novo Nordisk funding the trial. It found that a 2.4-milligram weekly dose of semaglutide, sold as Wegovy for weight loss, led to an improvement of 17 points on a 100-point scale. This point is used to assess symptoms of heart failure with preserved ejection fraction. Participants who got a placebo had a 9-point improvement.
According to Dr. Mikhail Kosiborod, cardiologist and vice president for research at Saint Luke’s Mid America Heart Institute, Kansas City, Missouri, who led the trial, Wegovy helped people with heart failure have less shortness of breath, fatigue, troubled exertion, and swelling, as well as better exercise function and quality of life which is all part of a scale known as the Kansas City Cardiomyopathy Questionnaire clinical summary score.
There are 64 million people globally living with heart failure, Novo Nordisk said in a statement about the trial results. It’s a condition in which the heart can’t pump enough blood to meet the body’s needs.
Preserved ejection fraction means the heart can pump normally but is too stiff to fill properly. This type of heart failure accounts for more than half of all cases in the US and is increasing in prevalence, according to Kosiborod and his co-authors. The study found that 80% of patients with this kind of heart failure in the US are obese or are characterized as overweight.
They also found that participants on Wegovy lost about 13% of their body weight, compared with 2.6% for those on placebo, over the course of the year.
Until recently, the main treatment options for people with this kind of heart failure were diuretics, sometimes called water pills, Kosiborod said. They increase urination to reduce the amount of fluid in the body and can temporarily alleviate symptoms, but they are “woefully insufficient,” he explained.
However, one limitation of the trial was that it lacked diversity in its research as 96% of the participants were White.
“We as a clinical trial community know that we need to do better in terms of patients that are Black, Hispanic, and from other backgrounds that are underrepresented in clinical trials,” Kosiborod noted.
However, he said another heart failure trial of Wegovy that includes patients with diabetes should have results soon, as merging the data can give a better picture of how the drug works for people of different races and ethnicities.
Ultimately, Kosiborod said as a physician who takes care of patients, he found the results “extremely gratifying, because what I now can tell them is that we have pretty definitive evidence that if we prescribe this medication, you will feel better and be able to do more, and it’s going to have a significant impact on your quality of life.”
